


a little magic, a little faith

by Elemental



Category: Majo no Takkyuubin | Kiki's Delivery Service, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Future Fic, Gen, Hatsume Mei Appreciation Fanclub, Slight ribbing at UA's...everything-ness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:33:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28310937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elemental/pseuds/Elemental
Summary: When Kiki is four and her quirk manifests, Jiji looks at her with woeful eyes and says, “Are you going to eat all of that, or can I have some of your chicken?”
Comments: 20
Kudos: 151
Collections: Clever Crossovers & Fantastic Fusions, Yuletide Madness 2020





	a little magic, a little faith

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nightmoonz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightmoonz/gifts).



> Yup, this is a crossover/fusion story with My Hero Academia and Kiki's Delivery Service. @nightmoonz asked for an AU for Kiki's, and seeing they read/wrote in MHA I realized I could use my current fandom obsession to gift them this treat!
> 
> Nightmoonz, I hope you enjoy this - I had an absolute blast writing it. May your holiday be one filled with cheer, good people and good food. May your year end be a joyful one and may 2021 be a brighter year for all of you and yours.

When Kiki is four, she wants - more than anything in the whole wide world - to be able to fly. Her mother has beautiful wings that curl around her shoulders and her father floats on the breeze like a fallen leaf. Her mother gathers her in her arms in the summertime and it’s so beautiful, so graceful, to be in the sky and feel weightless and unbounded and _free_.

When Kiki is four and her quirk manifests, Jiji looks at her with woeful eyes and says, “Are you going to eat all of that, or can I have some of your chicken?”

It’s not that talking with animals is a bad quirk. Talking with animals is an _amazing_ quirk, and everyone is so quick to tell her all of the things she’ll be able to do and be with it, even if it’s only Jiji for now, even if she doesn’t know how to turn it on or off and every other animal is still silent to her.

Everyone thinks it’s wonderful but Kiki only thinks about how even if she asks a hundred birds to carry her, she’ll forever be glued to the ground.

\---

When Kiki is six, she makes her dinner disappear.

Mother adds cooked peppers to her bowl, even though Kiki hates them, and Kiki glares and glares and glares at them while Mother and Father chide her to eat and then very suddenly the whole bowl - rice, peppers and all - disappears.

Mother looks shocked. Father looks confused. Kiki worries she’ll get in trouble for ruining her dinner somehow. Everyone talks at once until they realize the bowl is still there, just invisible. It stays invisible until Kiki sneezes.  
Jiji says ‘bless you’. Jiji is still the only animal she can hear. Everyone says that she’s just a late bloomer and her quirk will get stronger with time.

Father says, after a long moment, “Perhaps your quirk isn’t quite what we thought after all.”

\---

When Kiki is thirteen she’s accepted to Seiai Academy. She’s not there to be a hero, though the hero course is supposed to be very good. She'd considered being a hero - lots of people think she could be, if she learns to use her quirk more - but Kiki has only one dream: she wants to _fly_. She dreams of flying and stares at the sky during class and if she has a so called ‘witchcraft’ quirk, then she’s going to make sure flying is a part of that. She doesn’t need hero training, but she does need quirk training and maybe some support help. Seiai Academy has really great teachers, a quirk adaptation program, and doesn’t have the… history that UA carries with it.

Kiki doesn’t think she’ll be able to handle being attacked by villains, even if it hasn’t happened in a few years.

\----

When Kiki is fourteen, she meets Tombo. He’s… okay, he’s a _dork_ but he’s also amazing. He’s a support student with giant glasses and an even bigger grin. He’s working on a giant mass of metal that looks a bit like a backpack if you attached a pair of tubas to it.

“What are you making?” she asks, peering over the table and balancing on her toes.

“A jetpack,” he says, while there’s a screwdriver clenched between his teeth. “This is my third prototype.”

“Does it work?” She wonders what sort of quirk he has, because it isn’t obvious at first glance.

“It will,” he says, and then he drops the screwdriver and it rolls off the workbench and under another. “Not _again_.”

The workbenches are pretty big and the bottom is low to the ground - it’d be hard to get a hand under to dig something out. Kiki looks around and takes a bit of wire from the next workbench, twists it together and around and fashions a tiny stick figure she hums to life with a scrap of song. “Can you get the tool out from under here?” she asks it, setting it on the floor next to the bench.

“That’s _amazing_ ,” Tombo breathes, watching as the bit of wire in the shape of a person limbos under and a few moments later the tool rolls out. The wire figure rolls out a second screwdriver and a flashlight before emerging.

“Thank you very much,” Kiki tells it, touching the top of its head to end the spell. The wire is just wire once more and she gives it and the tools to Tombo. “I hope I didn’t ruin it, twisting it up like that? I should have asked.”

“No - it’s just wire. I didn’t know anyone could do that!” His eyes are wide and his hands keep moving so fast she thinks he’s going to lose grip of his tools again. “Can you do that for different sizes? Do they listen to complicated instructions?”

“I can only do small things right now,” she walks back to the jetpack. “I think this is more amazing. You could let anyone fly with one of these.”

“Really?” He blushes, bright red spots appearing on his cheeks. “I mean, I guess! I want to fly - it’s something I’ve dreamed about for my whole life.”

Kiki feels something in her chest pull tight. “Me too. I’ve been trying to make my quirk work that way - so I can fly, instead of just charming things - since I was six.”

For the first time in her life, someone doesn’t ask her what she’s doing wasting her quirk on something silly when she has such an obvious plethora of options available to her. Tombo looks her straight in the eye, adjusts his big black frames and asks: “Well, what have you tried so far?”

She thinks she’s a little bit in love. Just the smallest bit. In a friend sort of way.

\----

“Maybe it’s the type of broom,” Tombo offers one day at lunch. “Come by after class and we can try some things.”

Kiki comes by after lunch. She hadn't known that there were that many different types of broom. She'd never wondered if the type of wood or the kind of bristles might need to be of a specific sort, or that the elements she’s using in her quirk - her ‘magic‘ - might change her ability to fly. Tombo shrugs like it’s obvious.

“You say different drinks make different potions if you use your quirk on them, so different brooms might have different effects. Try this one - it’s maple with corn bristles. And that one is birch with palmera bristles, try that next.”

She tries different types of wood and different bristles; push brooms and lobby brooms and Amish brooms. None of them work.

“I think the shop vac is the wrong size,” Tombo mutters when he looks at it contemplatively. “Come back after class tomorrow and I’ll have a regular vacuum to try.”

Kiki thinks flying on a vacuum would be silly, but she doesn’t say no. She’s going to keep trying until she can do this. She wants to fly - she’s too heavy for her mother to carry, now. Her parents try not to fly when she’s around because they know she misses it, even though she tells them it’s okay. They have to miss the sky as much as she does.

\----

Tombo tries his jetpack and goes flying - literally. He crashes through the workshop wall, through the fenceline, and through some trees. He needs twenty-six stitches and has to spend a week in the hospital under the observation of a quirked doctor while his bones heal up.

Kiki brings him cookies that are spelled to help him heal faster and hot chocolate mix that will help him sleep easier, since she knows he has trouble sleeping away from home. “ _That_ was very foolish,” she tells him, as prudently as she can manage.

“Says the girl who jumped off the shed roof and broke her ankle last month,” Tombo quips back, smiling as she hands him cookies and dragging himself up in the hospital bed to look at her properly. His arm and leg are both wrapped in casts. Kiki pulls out a marker to draw a small Jiji on both of them. “You know I sent Hatsume a DM when I woke up? I asked her how she managed all of her amazing inventions at UA, when she built her own hover boots and way more dangerous machines besides. You know what she said?”

Kiki ignores the chair next to the bed and sits on the mattress itself, right at Tombo’s hip, and takes his arm to keep drawing on his cast. He’ll only have it for a week - she’s only got so much time to decorate it. She whistles under her breath to change the color of the marker as she doodles flowers around Jiji. “I can’t believe she replied to you. What did she say? Are you sure it wasn’t someone like her manager, or secretary?”

Tombo wiggles his fingers at the end of his cast and laughs. “I don’t think so! She said she got away with it because UA had Recovery Girl on staff. That ‘you can break a lot of bones and burn a lot of skin when someone who can literally kiss it better is a floor away’.”

Kiki leans back, imagining someone’s publicist writing _that_. “No wonder they got away with so much.” She remembers how crazy it was to watch the infamous class in their first and then second sports festival appearances. That had been part of why she'd never wanted to be a hero: if they hurt themselves that much just for a _school sports festival,_ how hard must training be when cameras aren't rolling? It makes her queasy to think about. Having someone around who makes getting hurt a non-issue must make some pretty reckless heroes.

She says as much to Tombo, who looks thoughtful. “Hatsume said… well, she said a few things, after that. She gave me some advice. I think maybe it’s good advice for both of us…”

Kiki listens, because whatever else can be said about UA’s hero class and the school, Hatsume Mei is a household name for her creations and Tombo’s been inspired by her hover boot designs for _years_. “What did she say?”

“That maybe we want it too much.” Tombo sees when Kiki frowns and looks away, and he flails his free hand at her to keep her attention. “Not that we should give up! She wasn’t saying that - she said the opposite, actually! That sometimes if you spend all your time focusing on _one thing_ you forget to develop all the other parts you need to get you there. Like I was so worried about thrust that I didn’t factor in how to keep the limiter from blowing out. And maybe you need to develop more of your quirk so that you can make things float, or grow wings, or change what things weigh or something else _first_ before you can fly.” Tombo catches Kiki’s hand and holds it in his. It’s _cold_ , but the hospital is cold. Kiki curls her fingers around his, lacing them together.

“I’m not giving up,” she tells him, because it’s _her dream_. She’s had this dream since she was _four_ and she’s nowhere near ready to let go of it yet.

“I’m not either.” Tombo squeezes her fingers back. His gaze is so serious; there are bruises under his eyes from long nights studying and early mornings in the workshop. “Neither of us should give up, but maybe we should take a break - just a break - and see if making other parts of ourselves stronger is what we need to do. We have all the time in the world.”

Kiki prods him in the cheek, hard.

“What was that for?”

“I hate it when you’re right.” She prods him again, and again, and again, until he’s trying to smack her away with their still-connected hands, his cast clutched tightly against his chest. She gives up only when he’s grinning and laughing and breathless: when the sadness at the edge of his gaze has lifted and faded away.

They can wait. They can get stronger first. They have time.

\----

“I need your broom!” Kiki begs the woman in the shop door as everyone gathered around runs and shouts and makes a general mess of things.

“What are you doing, girl? That’s a hero fight - you get moving with the rest.”

Kiki wants to ask what the woman herself is going to do if _she’s_ not moving with everyone else, but she doesn’t have time to ask - she grabs for the broom and the woman lets go with a squawk of surprise. “I’m sorry!” Kiki jumps out of reach while bowing in apology. “I’m sorry, but I have to save my friend!”

She runs before the shop woman can try to take it back. She skids around a corner, away from the moving mass of people fleeing from the fight. She’s in a narrow street with fewer people, so she’s not shoved around as she tucks herself close to the wall, slings a leg over the broom, and screams at her quirk to _work right now and do this for me_.

_There’s no time left._

Her power curls around her; it’s always felt like a tickle, like a warmth that itches and sometimes makes her sneeze. It’s always been slow and methodical, always grown from her belly outwards, but now she has _no time_. She forces it out and through her - down her arms and into the broom, down her legs and into the broom, into the ground below her, every ounce she can summon flowing and twisting but knotting inside of her instead of following her will. Kiki wants to cry as she bites her lip until it bleeds, whispering _please work_ over and over again until she’s breathless and then -

Then, very suddenly, Kiki can _see it_.

The broom is just a broom: it can hold power but it can’t _do_ anything with it - it’s a dead end, a line. Disconnected.

But she can make the broom a part of her: it can be part of a circle, part of a connection that goes up through her chest and down her arms and into the the broom and back to her pelvis and up again into her chest. If it’s a circle, her power can cycle. If it’s a cycle, she can make it _move_.

She bends her knees and kicks off and she _flies_.

\-----

“ _That_ ,” the hero Deku says, wiping the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his costume, “was a very, very dangerous thing you did there.”

Kiki’s very, very flat and leaning back against a bunch of bricks that used to be a whole store but are now just a very sad wall. They don’t hold anything up anymore: Kiki can sympathize. Her bones don’t want to hold _her_ up anymore, either.

Tombo is kneeling beside her and fretting even though he’s got bruises and soot marks all over him. “It was also _really brave_ ,” he tells her, tear tracks making clean lines down his cheeks. “I can’t believe you did that!”

“You were going to fall,” Kiki points out. This seems like a very reasonable observation. The fact that her bones feel like they’re made of soup is _also_ a reasonable observation. She’s used all her magic up for today - probably for a week. She’s _never_ felt quirk exhaustion like this before.

“You caught me!” Tombo reassures her. “You flew, Kiki, you _flew!”_

Kiki winces at the memory a little. “It wasn’t the worst first flight I could have had..” She’s still nauseated, maybe from the quirk use, maybe from the amount of times she’d tumbled and spun before she’d caught up to the sabotaged airship that Tombo had been clinging to. “But I caught you, and that's the important part.” And _that_ is worth a year of quirk exhaustion any day.

Deku crouches down next to her and Tombo. He’s all sooty and bruised too, but he’s still smiling. They’re waiting for rescue crews now: Kiki had brought herself and Tombo down on the far side of the battle.

“Was this your first time flying?” he asks, curious. “I thought it was your quirk?”

“My quirk’s called _witchcraft_ ,” she tells him, and it’s neat the way Deku’s whole face lights up. He asks her all sorts of questions. Tombo sometimes joins in to answer when Deku gets excited and starts theorizing; soon they’re talking about his jetpack project and how Tombo ended up clutching an airship tieline for dear life while it floated above Isahara.

Kiki realizes after a few minutes that Deku is helping keep them both from panicking and maybe making sure she doesn’t fall asleep even though she’s _really_ tired. Deku talks like he understands the basics of Tombo’s jetpack build, and he makes suggestions about how Kiki could use her quirk as a support hero, if she didn’t want to be a hero like he is, and _then_ he _doesn’t_ tell her that wanting to fly is a dumb waste of her quirk. She feels a lump rise in her throat that she has to swallow down.

“It’s been my dream ever since I was little,” she tells Deku, when she can manage it, and it’s only because she’s so tired and he’s so _nice_ that she’s telling him so much. “Ever since even before my quirk came in, I've wanted to fly. And _now I can_. I know how to do it and -” She’s not crying because she’s sad. She’s happy! Happy and really very tired and her bones are made of soup.

Deku’s eyes water a bit and he smiles so brightly that Kiki can’t help but smile back. “I know _just_ what you mean,” he tells her, and something in his voice makes Kiki believe him, like he truly does know. “I dreamed about being a hero for my whole life too, and when I was younger everyone told me, well... They told me it was a waste of my time. Now I’m here!” He makes a pose like All Might and both Kiki and Tombo laugh. “Here I am - and here you are.” His smile softens a bit as he looks at her. “You might have been reckless but you also saved your friend.”

Deku pulls a package of tissues from a pocket and hands them to Kiki, who uses one to ineffectually mop at her face. He pats her knee very gently. “You were both really brave. I’m sure no matter _what_ you do, you’re going to be amazing. The both of you.”

Tombo looks like you could push him over with a stiff breeze. Kiki tries to push him to prove it, but her arms are too weak to do much more than just flop at him.

“What?” He looks at her, instantly worried.

“Just ask for his autograph!” Kiki nods at Deku and Tombo because that’s easier than moving her arms again. “One day Tombo’s going to be just as famous as Hatsume is,” she tells Deku - because she _knows_ this will be true. “Then he’ll have all his hero signatures framed on the wall. He’s collecting them!”

Deku pulls out a pad of paper and a marker from another pouch on his waist and writes a quick message, tucking it into Tombo’s hands just as the rescue crews arrive in a flurry of flashing lights and worried faces.

Deku gets sent off to do more hero work while Kiki and Tombo get loaded into the ambulance to go to the hospital for a proper checkup. Apparently Kiki had hit her head landing and she doesn’t remember it at all, but Tombo does. They’re wrapped in blankets and laying side by side. Tombo sneaks his hand out and stretches over until he can catch Kiki’s, linking just their little fingers together.

“Thanks for saving me.”

“Thanks for not screaming my ear off as I got us out of freefall.” She hadn’t been prepared for the extra weight; it could have been terrible, but Tombo had just held tight and let her focus.

They both laugh. Laughing is way better than remembering how terrifying that was.

“What did Deku write to you?” she asks Tombo. The hero'd taken time enough to do more than just his signature. “What does it say?”

“That he can’t wait to hire me for his agency.” Tombo presses the folded paper to his chest, voice still tinged with awe. “He says Hatsume is going to be too busy to look after him _forever_.”

“Told you so.” Kiki closes her eyes - she’s probably allowed to rest now, right? “Next time we try your jetpack,” she murmurs, “let’s see what happens if I try to charm the throttle. Maybe we need to work on things together more - instead of trying to do them together but apart.”

Tombo tugs on her pinkie once, twice, three times before the paramedic needs to get between them and he has to let go. “Sounds like a plan,” he tells her, voice thick. “Next week, once we’re fixed up - I’ll meet you after class and we can try some things.”

\----

Tombo finishes his jetpack in time for the Seiai Academy Support Festival in their second year.

Hatsume Mei shows up _in person_ and offers him an internship on the spot. Kiki spends the rest of the day reassuring him it'd really happened while he very nearly floats around the way her dad does when _he’s_ happy.

That evening they go flying together and it’s... well. It's not perfect, because the jetpack is a lot faster than her broom and it’s actually really cold if you go that fast. The potion she’d brewed to keep them warm had only half worked: their hands are both frozen numb; she’s definitely going to have to work on to fix for later…

But it doesn’t have to be perfect.

They have all the time in the world to get it right.


End file.
